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Comment by dandigangi | Hacker News Reader

Is it still that popular? Felt like it peaked but not the type of software I do so I might be out of the loop.

Electron is huge. Wouldn't use anything else anymore these days, unless it absolutely needs to be native. JavaScript in 2021 also somehow turns out to be surprisingly usable. The ecosystem has really matured and people aren't chasing the latest hot new thing every 2 weeks anymore, but things kinda settled a bit.

I'm curious what you mean by "surprisingly usable" specifically.

This is just my subjective experience, but when I was first getting into node 6 years or so ago, it was pretty wild. Libraries would constantly make breaking changes, you couldn't count on things working for more then a month. JS is very expressive, and people happily did crazy things with it, like write entire frameworks based around generator functions. TypeScript promised some sanity, but usually led to even more headaches, due to lack standardized tooling, ecosystem support, random errors and so on. Sooner or later every codebase seemed to be doomed to become an unmaintainable mess.

But now it's a lot better. There's more consensus on what should be used, and most frameworks seem somewhat stable. Tooling is straightforward, in part thanks to VSCode I guess. Things like ESLint, JSHint are now standard. Altogether it feels more robust.

> Libraries would constantly make breaking changes, you couldn't count on things working for more then a month

This hasn't changed.

Pretty much all "desktop" apps that I see people using these days are built on Electron so yeah it is quite popular. Slack, Discord, Teams, Spotify, VSCode, the list is too long, unfortunately.

Not saying this is on the same level but I find it interesting that apps at that scale can run on Electron but Facebook's old non-native mobile apps performance was awful.

Their performance is awful too.

That was a decade ago.

I saw this with the draw.io desktop app which turned out to just be a big bloated Electron package by looks of it. I have a browser for that already.

I would say it did peak but it hasn't quite let up yet in my experience. So many companies, especially startups, fall into electron as a defacto desktop application framework because of it's cross platform promises.

having worked at a company that's gone down that road, I think the jury is out whether that was a great move.

I hope not as I saw Electron apps are like JAVA apps. No. Nope. No way. I can do without.

Not sure why you would think this. It's not even close to comparable.

Yeah, Electron is much worse than Java.

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